Arthur Stanley Link (August 8, 1920 in New Market, Virginia – March 26, 1998 in Advance, North Carolina)[1] was an American historian and educator, known as the leading authority on U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
Although his early writings were critical of Wilson for demanding overly-harsh reparations from a defeated Germany after World War I, Link grew to love him.
Link's point was that Wilson was a conservative until 1913, when he suddenly accepted the core values of Roosevelt's proposals to use the federal government to reform the economy.
The third was to argue that Progressivism collapsed after World War I because of internecine conflicts among reformers and uncertainties about how to pursue their agendas further.
Still, Link also argued that Progressivism was stronger in the 1920s than was generally acknowledged and that its underground currents formed the heart of the New Deal in the 1930s.
Link had previously stated that Wilson would have taken the same unbending stand against ratification of the Versailles Treaty with Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations if he had enjoyed perfect health.
[4] At one point, Link was attacked by some scholars for his medical interpretation of Wilson, and Princeton University and the funding agencies seemed unsupportive, which caused the long relationship to end on a sour note in 1949.
According to his obituary in The New York Times by Michael T. Kaufman:[1] "Day after day, year after year since 1958, Mr. Link would rise at 5:30 in the morning and search for, read and assess hundreds of thousands of documents that would eventually fill the volumes that Princeton University Press published at $65 each.